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Wednesday, November 02, 2016

`To Stimulate a Person for a Lifetime'

I
dug up an overlooked gem by Theodore Dalrymple, “Of Chekhov, Dickens, Henley and Pascal,” published last year in the New
English Review. As he often reminds us, Dalrymple is a shameless
investigator of other people’s book shelves. I share the urge, usually find it irresistible
though sometimes socially awkward, and have detected multiple motivations for my
behavior, which might be boiled down to mingled optimism and Schadenfreude. Optimism, because one is
always hopeful when it comes to finding previously unknown books and writers
one might wish to read. I know from happy experience that some of my favorite
volumes were hardly reviewed and never appeared on anyone’s syllabus. Their discovery
was pure serendipity. Schadenfreude,
because one always enjoy uncovering evidence of bad taste in others. Dalrymple
writes:

“.
. . the other day I had occasion to visit the elegant house of an old literary
couple. They were obliged by circumstances to leave me alone for a time in
their drawing room-cum-library, and I amused myself (at their suggestion, but I
would have done it anyway) with their books.”

I’ve
been in such situations many times. Years ago, I was interviewing a female
rabbi, a novelty for me and for much of upstate New York. She was called away
from her office for twenty minutes or so, apologized, and told me to make
myself at home. I interpreted that to mean I could troll her bookshelves, which
I assumed would be stocked with Judaica. Instead, I discovered the rabbi had
assembled a small library of books about folk music. I remember reading an
entry in one of her reference books about the Canadian folksinger Stan Rogers, who
died rather horribly in a fire onboard an airplane. The rabbi’s absence gave me
time for a relaxing browse.

In
the Schadenfreude category, I was
once in the apartment of a self-styled anarchist who, judging by his beer-fueled
rants, judged his fellow man, including yours truly, beneath contempt. The foulest
word he could find to describe us was “consumers.” I was there to talk about
the collection of essays he had recently published. Authors usually turn
servile when hawking their wares to a reporter. This guy turned sociopathically
adolescent. When he left the room for a few minutes, naturally, I looked more
closely at his bookcase: comic books, photocopied zines, a volume of Bakunin’s
greatest hits and three or four Tom Clancy novels. As E.H. Carr reports in his
1961 biography, Bakunin said: “No theory, no ready-made system, no book that
has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true
seeker.”

Among
the reasons I admire Dalrymple is that no experience, regardless of how
tedious or repellent it might be, is wasted on him. Everything potentially is
fuel for thought awaiting articulation. He closes his essay like this:

“I
had only a few minutes in my hosts’ library, itself but an infinitesimal part
of any decent municipal library, let alone of that of Congress or the British
Museum. In those few minutes I read only three or four sentences. There was
obviously enough in that one room to stimulate a person for a lifetime,
especially with the help of the internet. Now more than ever is what Pascal
said true, that all of Mankind’s problems derive from our inability to remain
alone quietly in a room.”